is blogging still a thing?

saving the universe

Star Trek Online lasted 3 months, including the freebie. I’m not annoyed that I wasted money on the “digital deluxe” edition or even that I wasted that particular chunk of gaming time. Cryptic, as an organization, clearly has a lot of work to do in their testing/design infrastructure before they can compete with the AAA crowd. Art? Top notch. Seriously. Look at my last post for reference. I LOVED flying around the universe in my Defiant. The “experience” of just tooling around in space with my gorgeous little ship was just plain nerdy fun.

The problem was that the Defiant is an escort-class ship. Escort ships, especially those flown by “tactical” captains were imbalanced. When they were putting the game together apparently no one thought the players would ever chain together every single buff/debuff they had for a full-speed alpha-strike. Cue the forum QQ and the inevitable nerfbat lashed out crippling virtually every aspect of the escort playbook. They attempted to offset these massive DPS changes by making escorts slightly more robust. So now you have tiny ships with crap shields, crap hulls and cannons that have about the same effectiveness as those little party poppers you give the kids on the 4th. Cruiser captains (the new king shit invincible douchenozzles) rejoiced.

I’m not a PvP guy. Under the right conditions I have enjoyed it, but I don’t play games FOR the PvP, nor do I generally leave games because of PvP. Star Trek Online is unfortunately far too shallow of a game to disengage yourself from PvP or the effects of “balancing for PvP” have on the rest of the game. In WoW there are clearly abilities and class synergies that are designed to be used in PvP. They have limited or no effective use unless you’re trying to smite that fucking druid who keeps running around the damned pillar. While some would consider this a weak or inelegant design it does allow the balance team to tweak certain PvP configurations up/down without harming PvE viability and vice-versa.

STO ain’t got that. Almost every ability you have is multi-purpose. Of the slew of abilities I possessed as a Rank 9 captain (5 short of the cap) maybe 3 were “designed” for PvP or PvE and had no use outside of that bubble. Long story short – PvE was NOT fun after my cannons stopped hurting things. I logged out in disgust after a particularly brutal pasting in a mission and checked my account status. It was due to expire the next day.

Yoink!

I’ll try and get some pictures up, but that may be a trick as the folder they were housed in got destructificated. This just in: Dropbox is fucking awesome. I know, I know, you already knew it was awesome, but sometimes you have to reiterate!

Anywho, on to bigger and better things. Since then I’ve had some sort of mental health problem that renders me incapable of passing up a sale on Steam. I just finished my first Mass Effect 2 game – very nice.